Hint if anyone’s considering pockets (which are a good option if the drying time of an all-in-one is too much for you) - I started off taking the inserts out, but realised that if I left them in they would be pretty much guaranteed to separate in the wash anyway. So it’s simply remove from the baby, fold the velcro over and pop in the bin.
Kushies biodegradable liners. They will make this MUCH easier. Also helps keep lotions off the diapers and keep them from wicking.
When my first was born, I was young and idealistic (and poor.) I used cloth diapers for the first month, and his rashes were horrible - no matter what detergent I used, no matter whether I changed diapers on the half-hour 'round the clock, regardless of the ointments I used, no matter whether I washed in boiling water and dried in the sunshine. I chalked it up to unusually sensitive skin, bought disposables*, and went about my business.
Baby #2 came along, and I wasn’t quite as young, nor as idealistic: It only took a couple of weeks before I said “Screw the environment, this child isn’t gonna survive these rashes!”
Seeing a pattern emerging, Littlest Miss came home from the crunchy granola midwife center where she was born wearing a disposable diaper, and has (at 10.5 months) has never had a diaper rash.
According to my own mother, she had the same experience when I was an infant - everything irritated my skin. Like elfkin, I’m a redhead, and so are my kids…
*I will say, though, that the worst diaper rash that my son ever had came after I switched to disposables. I usually bought whatever brand was cheapest and unscented, but one of my cousins passed along some Pampers that her kid had outgrown. A few days in that brand, and the poor little guy finally had to have a prescription steroid cream. Never bought that brand again, never had that problem again. I currently use Huggies brand Pure & Natural diapers - they work well, and they don’t irritate Little Miss at all. Plus, they regularly have on-line coupons that make the cost comparable to a basic store-brand diaper.
We used a diaper service for a couple of months after **Dweezil **was born.
I liked the concept a lot more than I liked the reality. Those things are a hassle when you’re out and about - you have to lug the soiled / wet dipe back home. And the way kids pee and poop constantly, they really need to be changed every hour on the hour, sometimes more, sometimes less. While you don’t want to let a baby sit in poop in a disposable, a pee diaper can be ignored for a while.
Plus, we had a lot of leakage issues with the cloth diapers. This may have been worsened by the fact that we used a velcro diaper-wrap vs old-fashioned plastic (with the elastic around waist / legs).
If you’re going to be mostly at home, and have your own washer/dryer, it’s certainly worth a try.
Sidenote: You can get vaccinated against Hepatitis A (the kind that is spread through the fecal-oral route). There’s no reason to be afraid of it when it can be prevented so easily.
That’s assuming you haven’t already been exposed to it. A lot of people have been exposed to Hep A without realizing what it was and if you have it once you’ll be immune.
The chronic types of Hepatitis are spread by blood not feces, and once again you can be vaccinated against Hep B. Even though there is no vaccine for Hep C, it’s still treatable and in many cases can be cured.
I did it for about a year with my son, starting at 15 months or so. I’d do it again if we were to have another (which we won’t, but still). I mostly used pocket diapers; my favorite brands were Happy Heinys and Green Acre Designs. For an infant I’d probably go with prefolds and covers to begin with, though (despite the slightly steeper learning curve), because they’re so much cheaper. Then switch to one-size pockets once the kiddo was big enough to fit in them.
You can really spend just about whatever amount of money you want to spend on cloth diapers. Good quality prefolds and PUL covers are much cheaper than disposables. Something like what I used I’d guess you’d come out about even if you had to resize every few months (which I didn’t) and didn’t re-sell (which I did). Fancy fitteds or wool covers can be very expensive.
Keeping up with the laundry is not particularly difficult (except probably in the newborn stage). It’s an extra load every couple of days, typically.
This.
One last comment, if you’re planning to use cloth diapers, you should really check with the daycare provider you use if you work. Many daycare centers don’t accept cloth diapers. Or they’ll require that you provide enough ziplocs for them to individually package each soiled diaper. If your goal is to save the environment, having to throw out six to eight ziplocs (I’m not counting the diapers you’d use at home) every single day might be a concern for you.
I was going to chime in to mention liners, but you beat me. We didn’t use them when my son was only breastfeeding. But once his poop started getting solid, liners worked great.
One of our daycares used a separate bag for each diaper (this was for either cloth or plastic disposable diapers). The other daycare required just one bag for a day’s worth of diapers, and they were fine with the plastic grocery bags in a diaper pail. Not that either route is exactly environmentally friendly… but I still preferred the cloth due to our son’s rash issues compared to plastic. When it came to the individual bags, as long as they weren’t visibly soiled we took the diapers out for washing and reused the bags for dog poop bags. I imagine some of the more hepatitis-fearing souls might faint at that idea, but it did make me feel better about the plastic waste.
That’s me, too. In concept, yeah. Reality - its really nice not to be dragging around dirty diapers because you aren’t home. I was dragging so much CRAP around when they were infants, dragging literal crap around probably would have sent me to the “mommy’s rest home.”
We had a “disposables daycare” which pretty much sealed our fate.
This article in the NYTimes was interesting; Green, But Still Feeling Guilty(about using disposable diapers).